BOULDERThe Web100 Project, a collaboration designed to help users
take full advantage of available bandwidth on high-speed networks, today
announced the release of its Alpha 1.0 software, the first public release
of software through the project.

Web100 software aims to bring data transmission rates on high-speed networks
up to at least 100 megabits per second (Mb/s), the full available bandwidth
for these networks. Previous versions of Web100 software were available
only to a select group of evaluators and researchers at universities and
government laboratories. These users contributed critical feedback to
the initial development process.

Tom Dunigan, a key early contributor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(ORNL), stated, "Web100 is an important component in the Department
of Energy's network research efforts at ORNL. Web100 has helped us to
characterize the performance of network paths and to understand and tune
the TCP protocol."

Started in November 2000 and funded by the National Science Foundation
(NSF) and Cisco Systems, Web100 is a three-year project to develop the
tools needed to allow network users to transparently achieve high bandwidth
data rates over research networks. Most of these networks are capable
of transmitting 100 Mb/s, but they rarely achieve performance greater
than 3 Mb/s.

"Solving such service problems using open source and open standards
is the model established by Web100," said Tom Greene, senior program
director at NSF. "This model is being used in all the projects funded
through the new NSF Middleware Initiative."

Specific goals of the Web100 Project include enabling ordinary network
users to attain full network data rates without help from network experts,
and developing the software components necessary for a high-performance
network host software environment. Today's software release makes significant
contributions to both goals by including instrumentation and tools that
diagnose performance at the sender and receiver ends of a network connection
and at any point along the network path.

In addition to the software release, Web100 programmers continue to refine
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) softwarethe language used to
communicate across networksin the Linux operating system so that
users can automatically achieve the highest possible transfer rate. This
effort has already led to a first draft of a new Internet Engineering
Task Force standard. As the development of new standards progresses, Web100
researchers hope that other operating system vendors will adopt the Web100
enhancements. Such changes will make increased TCP traffic flows easier
to handle and more transparent for the users of high-speed networks.

One of the first to take advantage of Web100 breakthroughs is Michael
Schmidt, group head for systems and networks at Unidata, a Boulder-based
program that supports an international network of universities and research
organizations that exchange hundreds of gigabytes of data daily.

"We've found a dramatic improvement in data transport can be achieved
from a better understanding of network configuration and the TCP parameters
revealed by Web100," said Schmidt. "Our future code enhancements
will take advantage of the concepts we've learned from Web100 and integrate
them into our next generation of data distribution software."

Said Matt Mathis, "We now have enough of the foundation in place
that we can start encouraging insightful contributions from other networking
experts." Mathis is the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's network
research coordinator and one of the principal investigators with the Web100
Project. "In the end we would like Web100 software to encompass as
much expertise and skill as possible," he said. "Ultimately
these efforts will free ordinary users from being distracted by the details
of tuning the
network."

Now in its second year, the Web100 Project is a collaboration of the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR),
and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. NCAR's primary sponsor is the National
Science Foundation. Unidata is a program of the University Corporation
for Atmospheric Research.

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